It is a sad fact that my stock-in-trade as a foreign correspondent over 20 years has been the infinite capacity of human beings to inflict upon each other pain, suffering and misery.

But every so often here in Britain there emerges a story so appalling in its detail that it stops you in your tracks.

The battering to death of little Jamie Bulger by two young boys in Liverpool was one such story.

The dreadful abuse leading to the death of Victoria Climbie was another.

And the mind-numbingly sadistic and callous torture and killing of the infant, pitifully labelled Baby P, in the same London Borough of Haringey is the latest example.

It defies belief that such a thing could happen in our midst… and yet at the same time it doesn’t, because of course it’s happened before and it will happen again.

Enough has been written and said already about the abject failings of Haringey’s child protection services and the breathtaking complacency of its most senior official.

Surely the most alarming failure was that of the paediatrician charged with examining the baby but who couldn’t even spot several broken ribs and a broken back.

But this is not simply a story about Haringey and its social workers and doctors.

Rather it is a story about the state of Britain today.

A story of family breakdown, single parents struggling to cope and of neglected children raised by ill-equipped mothers without any support network.

In the case of Baby P, the infant’s mother shared a filthy council house with two men.

One was a boyfriend who turned out to be a Nazi-loving sadist and the other a lodger on the run with his 15-year-old girlfriend.

No sign of Baby P’s father, no sign of the grandparents, no sign of any help at all.

What chance did Baby P have in a house like that?

And just imagine for a moment that he had survived the dreadful abuse.

That he grew up subjected to horrendous violence and physical torture.

What sort of young man would Baby P have turned into?

A violent misfit is my guess. The abused turned abuser. And so it goes on.

Iain Duncan Smith was an unsuccessful leader of the Tory Party but in the work he’s done since on the issue of broken homes in broken communities he’s been spot on. He has no doubt that dysfunctional family life is the root cause of the problem.

And the statistics he’s come up with are truly alarming. He says 25 per cent of children in this country live in single-parent families and these children are three to six times more likely to experience abuse.

He estimates one-and-a-half million children from broken families are considered to be at risk from abuse. And he offers solutions along the lines of a successful scheme in Chicago where teenage single mums are helped by intervention at an early stage.

The attention last week has been on one dysfunctional council, and quite rightly.

But the real challenge are Britain’s dysfunctional families. They are far more difficult to fix.